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New Music Concert Listings - Scotland

Welcome to the Composition:Today New Music Concert Listings.
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This will be the BBC SSO’s first major musical event of 2014, and a fascinating overview of a life in music, conducted by the composer himself.

For the first time in over a decade, Scotland’s foremost composer James MacMillan takes to the podium in his native country for a public concert. The programme, to be recorded for of BBC Radio 3’s Hear and Now, features two World Premieres from opposite ends of MacMillan’s career: his latest work The Keening and his early Symphonic Study, written as a graduation piece.

There’s also the Scottish Premiere of A Deep but Dazzling Darkness, a stunningly dramatic reflection on the ability of music to bring comfort, and in this performance a tremendous showcase for the skills of BBC SSO leader Laura Samuel. For Sonny, a gentle elegy in memory of a young child, is premiered in a new arrangement, and Exsultet, his 1998 fanfare for brass quintet (in the revised version for symphonic brass), conjures up a typically MacMillan-like journey from darkness into light.

To Scots, living on so many islands and dependent on it for so much, the sea is a constant presence to be loved and admired, but also feared and respected. This complicated relationship with the sea is reflected here in pieces by two of the most important and widely performed living composers.

MacMillan’s Tuireadh laments the dead of the Piper Alpha disaster in great tidal movements of sound and grief. South African composer Volan’s Symphony offers a beautiful and oblique reflection “on the sea and the role of ships and their cargoes in our history”.